UK Suppliers Chillblast have just revamped their site and it's looking pretty good.

Amongst their guides is what I consider to be the best guide on unlocking the XP CPU's multiplier bridges.

You can read it Here

That is a good guide! Lots of pictures so I can't go wrong

I think the best guide I've seen was the video they made at Tom's Hardware for unlocking the XPs, when the Palomino core had just been released. It's on my hard drive somewhere...

Great guide

I would suggest to people that over clocking isn't the best way to speed up a PC..... often getting some CAS2 memory if you can find it at the max clock the motherboard / cpu supports gives great performance. Also Hard disks are a massive bottle neck. I have used Raid to "stripe" my data across two disks so that it actually gets a transfer rate going that makes DMA66 start to look worried (although I'm on a DMA100 MB..... I'm sure there's no difference )

There are also 1001 bios tweaks that you can do to help performance.... I'd suggest learning how to reset the cmos and them playing a bit

As far as the CPU goes, I found I could change the FSB speed and hence overclock in bios without actually upping the multiplier, and the athlon didn't moan Along the ame lines, I also find squeezing an extra few MHZ out of the PCI bus never hurts, and make sure your graphics card is on 4x AGP or better if you can support it.......

All good points.

I'm currently running RAID 0. BIOS tweaked to max. DMA100. 16K stripes, 16K clusters.

FSB as high as it can can go before ATI Radeon 32MB DDR gives me the thumbs down. AGP x 4.

Nothing like an unlocked CPU to give you an unfair advantage

I'd unlock mine but I think I've managed to fuse the heat sink to it.......

Hehe....

Actually, I really need to upgrade. I'm only on a Athlon 800 / 100MHZ FSB and it's tweaked to high heaven. Got it running faster in all benchmarks than my Boyfriends 1.4 Athlon / 133 (much to his disbelief!)

So... that really means a motherboard / CPU / Memory upgrade. Graphics (ti4400) / sound (Sonicfury XG) are fine, but I need recommendations for a good motherboard / CPU+cooler / Memory combo. Stability is essential... as I do a lot of uni work on my system. Decent speed desairable, and economy never a bad thing as I am still a student

I tried to unlock my XP using the toms hardware way, next time I would use another method, the superglue to the laserlocks is too permanent. If u mess up its too late (As I did).

How'd you mess up? Sorry to hear that.

When and if I actually get round to unlocking an XP, I think I'd use a slow setting epoxy resin, rather than superglue.

Advantages are is that you can study the drying pattern of say, Araldite, as it sets, and adjust with a needle if necessary. Gives you more of a chance, I'd think.

Also, superglue can become brittle and may sever and move over a relatively short period of time.

That's just my angle on it though Thoughts?